Cellular communication involves assignment of a phone number (Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number (MSISDN)) to a device, such as a telephone. Such an assignment provides a one-to-one relationship between the device, the phone number and the associated subscriber identification module (SIM) card. For person-to-person communication, such a relationship works well in that people generally talk frequently and for extended periods of times. However, for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, machines generally talk infrequently and for comparably very short periods of time (i.e. milliseconds). Examples of devices that may use M2M communication may include intelligent cars, communicative GPS, Smart Meters at homes etc. If the same methodology for assignment of phone numbers for person-to-person communication were to be used for M2M communication, the number of available phone numbers would quickly run out. Further, management of phone numbers is not an inexpensive undertaking for communication service providers.
Because of the established cellular infrastructure, many M2M communication devices leverage the existing cellular infrastructure by embedding a SIM card in devices and adding a communication module. Using the existing cellular infrastructure is an efficient way of implementing new services on existing infrastructure, and optimizing the usage and costs associated with such devices. However, with device multiplication, as discussed above, communication service providers are facing the issue of running out of numbers as each device consumes a phone number. This is because the numbering plan in every country allows a finite set of available phone numbers, which will cause near term shortage in most countries. Studies have shown that the shortage may occur within the next two years.
In order to address the potential shortage of phone numbers, cellular concentrators may be used to allow several machines to communicate using a single telephony number. Such concentrators embed the cellular connectivity and provide an alternate communication mechanism to groups of devices by acting as a proxy and gateway. The cellular concentrators however use a different protocol compared to cellular communication. Furthermore, cellular concentrators use an additional communication mechanism, and therefore add components and cost to the communication system. Other solutions that use secondary communication infrastructure also lack the reliability, security, functionality and ubiquitous coverage that cellular provides.